Telstra reassures customers over e-mail virus
January 19, 2001
Telstra has reassured its Bigpond Internet customers over a computer virus that has been circulated through a Telstra e-mail.
Telstra Bigpond's public affairs manager Stuart Gray says the service had to be shut down last night as technicians worked to remove the virus from Telstra's e-mail system.
"Yesterday afternoon...[we sent] out a message to our Telstra dot-com users, about 300,000 of them, and one of the people who received that message had a virus on his computer, the virus attached itself to the message, changed the message and sent it back into the Telstra system and from then on the virus bounced off the Telstra mail server," he said.
Mr Gray says it is a nuisance-type virus that does not cause physical damage to a computer.
He said most users would have realised the Telstra e-mail had been altered when they saw the amended subject line, which read: "Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs - the Real Story".